A literary descendant of Gogol & in many respects a counterpart to Oscar Wilde & Joris-Karl Huysmans in the scope of Decadent (early modern) literature, Fedor Sologub (1863-1927) in his lifetime elicited both admiration & outrage. Of the nine novellas, stories & fables presented in facing dual language format in this volume, four appear for the first time in English translation & two for the first time in post-Revolutionary Russian orthography. Several protagonists are children & one is a chronically shrinking adult. Typical themes are disillusionment, transcendent dimensions & approaching madness. Murl G. Barker, Jason Merill & Jonathan Perkins joined Smith in contributing fine translations, as did Marina Kanevskaya & Solomon Ioffe in providing highly insightful scholarly articles on Sologub & his works. One of the most provocative parts of this book is the text, translation & explication of Maxim Gorky's 1912 lampoon of Sologub, which along with Ioffe's article on relations between the two writers does indeed offer "one of the livelier footnotes to the study of Silver Age Russian literature."